Monday, June 9, 2014

Angle-ish

Tribal people who spoke
an early variety of German left northern Europe in search of a better climate
and settled on the British Isles. They were the Angles, the Saxons and the
Jutes. The Jutes faded out or were assimilated, but the Angles and the Saxons
dominated the islands for a long time, speaking their guttural Germanic
language we call Anglo-Saxon. Then, in 1066, William the Conqueror, a
French-speaker from Normandy, invaded, won and proclaimed that important
business of the government and court in Angle-land (England) must be carried on
in French, but that the Anglo-Saxon peasants (mainly women, since the men had
been killed in battle) were not worthy of the lofty language called French.

Professor Elliot Engle
of North Carolina State University further simplifies this condensed view of
history by saying something like the following. The victorious French soldiers
saw that land was cheap in the newly-conquered country so they asked the courts
if they might buy some land and live in England. Yes, of course, was the
answer. Then, seeing that the Anglo-Saxon widows were very pretty, they asked
if they could marry one of the peasant women. Again, the answer from the French
authorities was affirmative. Then the question came. Well, if I marry an
Anglo-Saxon peasant woman, I will have to teach her French. Would that be permissible?
The answer was emphatic: absolutely not. We do not want our wonderful language
in the mouths of those women. So, the soldiers asked the next question. Well,
then, if I cannot teach her French, I will have to learn that awful Anglo-Saxon
language. And the magistrates said, no, we will not have our Frenchmen speaking
that guttural garbage. Just marry the woman and soon the most important words
in both languages will emerge and you will be able to conduct household
business that way.

And, oversimplified as
it may be, that is exactly what happened. The English language is not Latin at
its base at all. It is Germanic. We get our Latin from the French, which, like
Italian, Spanish and Romanian, is a variety of the Latin tongue, because Julius
Caesar required most conquered countries to speak his native tongue. England is
a glaring exception to that rule. I guess Caesar thought those islands would
ever amount to anything.

Anyway, the result of
the marriage of French and Anglo-Saxon was that the entire vocabularies of
those languages were thrown into a pot and stirred. Because of that, English
has more vocabulary than any other language on earth, more than a half-million
words. No other language even comes close. That is why we can say things in
such a variety of ways. The French look for the perfect words for the thought.
English just flops something out there and reiterates it until understanding
comes.

Chinese is the most
spoken language on earth, but English is still number one because it is the
language of business, commerce and travel. I am told that all pilots and ship
captains speak English in communicating with each other and with control
entities. I have also heard that English teachers are in demand in China.